Re: Getting rid of a temporary variable in AoH

[choroba]

Once the @fields array is declared inside the loop, you can safely destroy it:

while ( my $line = <DATA> ) {
    chomp $line;
    my @fields = qw( login      uid   gid       name           home   
+   shell );
    my @items  =
        $line =~ /^([\-\w]+):x:(\d+):(\d+):([\-\w\s\(\)\,]*):([\w\/]+)
+:([\w\/]+)$/
            or die "Malformed input [$line]";

    push @users, {};
    $users[-1]{ shift @fields } = shift @items while @fields;
}

[AnomalousMonk]

A variation (imagine the  my $datum = shift @data is reading a file; no need to create  @fields array each time through loop; state only available with 5.10+; either version works the same):

>perl -wMstrict -MData::Dump -lE
"my @data = (
   'foo 123 %^&',  'huggle 9876 @*',   'ab 55555 !@$%^&',
   );
 ;;
 my @users;
 while (my $datum = shift @data) {
   # use constant FIELDS => qw(   alphas        digits          stuff)
+;
   state $fields = [ qw(        alphas        digits          stuff) ]
+;
   my @items = $datum =~ m{ ([[:alpha:]]+) \s+ (\d+) \s+ ([^[:alpha:]\
+d]+) }xms;
   # @{ $users[@users] }{ FIELDS() } = @items;
   @{ $users[@users] }{ @$fields } = @items;
   }
 ;;
 dd \@users;
"
[
  { alphas => "foo", digits => 123, stuff => "%^&" },
  { alphas => "huggle", digits => 9876, stuff => "\@*" },
  { alphas => "ab", digits => 55555, stuff => "!\@\$%^&" },
]